@AcidD You are probably seeing the effect of different averages. That’s why I look at the actual difficulty.
The only way to calculate the hash rate is from the difficulty, which is calculated from the times of previous blocks.

So assume the worst for a minute: someone privately has figured out ASIC mining neoscrypt and is planning a sustained attack?

What’s the contingency plan? I think i remember years back a discussion that if that ever were to happen, the devs would race to put together yet another unique algo to make it ASIC resistant again.

I understand trying to plan for the worst but my first thought here is why would someone do this? Developing an ASIC for NeoScrypt for the purpose of attack is foolish. ASICs are crazy expensive to develop and if used only to attack the network there is no recoup of that investment. The better option would be to develop it and mine all NeoScrypt coins for profit. Or sell the ASIC miners to the public.

@AmDD This is all very true. But at some point as there are fewer and fewer surviving old coins, it’ll make sense for them to try and disable each other. Profitable not directly, but by disabling the “competition”. (or it may appear smart to do so and someone does it, i think these kinds of attacks would hurt trust in all coins tho and be stupid). There are a lot of unpredictable instantly now rich people out there, who knows what they might do.

Or a less nefarious situation. FTC price rises to the point where developing an ASIC miner does make sense. Just wondering if the long term goal is to remain a GPU-minable coin or if ASIC would be embraced?

while we don’t have another Asic resistant algorithm in our pockets, the philosophy behind Feathercoin is to keep the mining as distributed as posible, and therefore Asics won’t be embraced by the community or the developers